• So many were surprised at the sudden exit of Sir Paul Stephenson, the ex-commissioner. And after an hour of grilling him about his decision, members on the home affairs committee were none the wiser on the subject of why he left the top policing job in the land. I wasn't pushed, I did no wrong, he said. Still, one man saw it coming and that man was the former assistant commissioner of the Met, Brian Paddick. He tells a Guardian Focus Podcast on the Met crisis that he never believed the former commissioner would hang around if things became problematic. "I had a conversation with Paul Stephenson when he became deputy commissioner. He told me he already had his time in for his pension and that if you got to the stage where it got too difficult and he wasn't enjoying it, he would go. And that was when he was deputy. So I am not surprised that when it did get difficult, he went." The ducking stool or a well-earned retirement? No brainer.

• Yes, troubles at the Met, with the top tier out the door and questions mounting about its failure to get tough on pie-wielding comedians. Much is going awry, and that must include the London police station where officers have been sent a bulletin warning them that a former colleague – a PC who left in disgrace – may be planning to smuggle or trick his way back into one of their buildings and they should all be ready for him. He doesn't stand a chance of evading security. Unless he is carrying shaving foam and a paper plate.

• And trouble in the Lords, where Lib Dem peer Jenny Tonge rose to speak against plans which might make it harder for individuals to get an arrest warrant to facilitate a citizen's arrest. Things work pretty well as they are, said the baroness. You are merely cross that a warrant was obtained last year to facilitate the arrest of the then Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. No we are not, said such as Lord Carlile. Our objections are procedural. Pretty strong objections they were too. For when the baroness sought to press ahead, Lord Carlile protested that she was "having a rant at Mrs Livni" and moved a motion to shut her up in a fashion unlikely to be entertained in the Commons. Peers agreed "that the noble baroness be no longer heard". Silenced and enraged, Baroness Tonge exited forthwith. They have their own way of doing things in the other place.

• Too long since we checked on our friend, the author, commentator and rightwing polemicist Paul Johnson. We find him in the Spectator writing about the extent to which Evelyn Waugh's writing was helped by the sexual betrayal he suffered at the hands of his wife. "Evelyn Gardner again rendered him a priceless service by her almost diabolical treachery," writes Johnson. "Her cunning adultery and then her flagrant desertion struck Waugh like an earthquake, and showed him that he cared very much indeed. Coinciding as it did with his gradual, then accelerated, immersion in Catholicism, it added a whole new dimension to his fictional appetites." So was it his own quest for excellence that led Johnson himself to betrayal and the fervent pursuit of sexual adventures? ("Paul loved to be spanked and it was a big part of our relationship. I had to tell him he was a very naughty boy," confessed his mistress of 11 years, Gloria Stewart). It is what separates the great writers from the mundane. The Waughs and the Johnsons of this world go the extra mile.

• Finally, a big hi to Nicholas "Fatty" Soames, the Tory grandee who is characteristically forthright as he considers the often complicated, mutually beneficial, currently fraught, relationship between journalists and politicians. "You would never get me cosying up to journalists," he said on the BBC Radio Sussex breakfast show. "I hate them." Which is his right, though it would suggest a certain frostiness towards Saga magazine, edited by his sister. One might also recall his cheery appearance in the offices of the Daily Telegraph some years back, but that would be churlish, for then he had been summoned to eat eight-year-old beef to prove to the nation that it was healthy to do so. Fatty bottled his hatred and cleaned his plate.